The Fifty-ninth Grade

In September of 1949, I entered first grade.

In September of 2007, I am entering the 59th grade. I will learn things this year that I didn't know in 58th grade; some good, some bad, all interesting. This year I will achieve a balance that I have been courting since the 36th grade. In that year, I decided it would be the best of worlds to have the imagination of a six-year-old, and the experience of a 65-year-old.

In March of the 59th grade, I will become 65 years old. There are liabilities associated with becoming 65 that I did not start to learn about until about the 55th grade, when the fair wear and tear of aging started to set in. I didn't much like it when some of my original parts started to fail. I could not possibly have known about this in the reckless days of 36th grade, but I think I would have been enthusiastic about being six and 65, all the same. What can happen, when imagination and experience have all day to play?

Keeping the imagination of a six-year old has required some study. Six-year-olds, of course, live their whole lives outside the box. Calvin, of "Calvin and Hobbes," the old comic strip, is our king. Calvin's pal is Hobbes, a tiger, and quite a tiger he is: funny, erudite, worldly, mischievous, playful, charming. He and Calvin have a heck of a time, out there outside the box. Then one of Calvin's parents comes in, and Hobbes becomes what he is inside the box: a stuffed animal.

That is the altogether healthy and worthwhile magic of being six, and I believe, because of Calvin, and an experience at Disneyland, that I have learned how to be six in my 60s. The Disneyland lesson occurred one day in the early 1980s. I was walking down Main Street toward Sleeping Beauty's Castle. On earlier visits, the castle had soared into the sky, spires reaching for the clouds, just like the real fantasy castles of Europe.

Only this day, maintenance was being done on the castle. Scaffolding was up. From long experience, I knew the dimensions of scaffolding. This scaffolding, overlaying the castle like a grid, betrayed the castle's true size, which was very small. It didn't soar at all, and its spires were barely adequate to reach for the top of a telephone pole.

This was a major disappointment. I looked at my kids, who were then about six and eight. They didn't see the scaffolding. Rather, they didn't see the size of the scaffolding. They had no way of knowing. And then it struck me: if Walt Disney had ever had the slightest evidence that a six-year-old knew the dimensions of scaffolding, the scaffolding would come down every morning before opening time, and not go up again until after closing.

So the problem was data. When we turn six, we go into first grade, and we start to acquire data, which starts to overlay imagination, and choke it down to size. It is the birth of the box, which it is so important to think outside of. Here's a graphic that helps describe the secret to being six in your 60s. Put nine dots on a piece of paper: three across the top and bottom, three on each side, one in the middle, so that it looks like a box with a dot in the middle. Now connect the nine dots with four straight lines, without taking your pencil off the paper.

The solution: start at the upper left-hand dot, draw a line across the top row of dots, and keep going beyond the right-corner dot. Go out far enough to draw a line through the middle dots in the right and bottom sides, to a point where a line drawn straight up will connect the left-side dots. Once back at the upper-left dot, draw the fourth line through the middle dot to the lower-right dot.

The secret is to let your brain think beyond the upper-right dot, and take the line out to the point where the second line can connect the right and bottom middle dots. That extension of the first line, out beyond the dot, is where imagination reigns. Out there, anything is possible. Out there, Hobbes and Calvin live. Out there resides a magnificent talking animal who presides over an international multi-billion-dollar entertainment kingdom. Do we believe this animal can talk? We surely do; by the tens of thousands, people put up $65 a ticket to go to Disneyland and talk to Mickey.

I wander out beyond the dot a lot, and see the most amazing, impossible, perfectly real, things, smack in the middle of otherwise ordinary days. In my readings in the last several grades, I am discovering how justifiable this is. I read that physicists, in trying to understand the universe, are starting to arrive at a point where all their data breaks down. It stops making sense. To go farther, they have to use . . . imagination. Beautiful.